Disorder, page 6
Realizing any such political move on American terms proved impossible. Although the West European states were obliged as a condition of Marshall aid to draw up plans for an economic federation, they got little further than an agreement to reduce trade barriers and organize payments. Since they had trading interests outside Europe that were not dollar-based, both the British and French governments were deeply reluctant to acquiesce. For them, West European security depended not on economic federation but on a military alliance with Washington that acknowledged a German as well as a Soviet threat to peace.15 In 1948, Britain, France, and the Benelux governments agreed to establish a Western Union as a mutual defence pact in the hope they could eventually persuade the Americans to join too. They were vindicated when the Soviet blockade of Berlin caused Truman to change his mind. The result was NATO, committing the United States, along with Canada, to a treaty obligation to respond to any attack not just on the five Western Union states but also Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, and Portugal.16
NATO represented a massive American departure. For the first time, the United States was committed to a peacetime Eurasian alliance. NATO’s very name—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—rather obfuscated this geopolitical shift by collapsing the distinction between the Western Hemisphere and one part of Eurasia. Yet Italy and Portugal’s membership belied any notion that the Monroe doctrine had been redefined to include the North Atlantic. From the start, NATO also raised hard questions about who would pay for the alliance’s military commitments, including American military bases in Europe. In principle, each member state was required to make payments as a proportion of GDP. In practice the near bankrupt West European states promised more money than they actually contributed.17
As well as its long-term geographical and fiscal fault lines, NATO left the immediate matter of West German security unresolved. The creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 had established some basis for a Franco-German rapprochement. Indeed, for its strongest proponents the ECSC was supposed to make war between France and West Germany impossible by establishing supranational control over Germany’s coal resources and steel industry in the Ruhr. This though left the question of West Germany’s position in regard to the Soviet Union unresolved. Here, the Korean War convinced Truman that West German rearmament was necessary. But NATO’s structure ensured that taking West Germany inside it required a national army for a fully sovereign West Germany. Finding that option unpalatable, the French government offered as an alternative the abortive European Defence Community (EDC).18 Yet this option entailed each member state immediately placing its national military force under a supranational command with a long-term objective of moving to political union, which Britain would not contemplate. In 1952, the French government finally agreed with the five other ECSC members to establish an EDC. But, despite enormous American pressure, the French Parliament refused to ratify the treaty. Since Eisenhower was not prepared to back down on West German rearmament, West Germany instead had to enter NATO.
By 1955, NATO provided the framework for West European security, yet its foundations were shaky. There were too many internal European geopolitical tensions for a West European security federation, considerable costs for the Americans in a financially skewed NATO, and significant risks for Western Europe in accepting the American nuclear umbrella when the Cold War was spreading well beyond Europe. Inside Europe, if security was the strongest rationale for federation, whether as a customs union or a defence community, NATO made this political logic redundant. Yet if the American security commitment were to prove unreliable, the only basis left for European federation would be economic. In the 1960s, de Gaulle would try to overturn this conundrum and fail. Consequently, when the European Union did emerge from the 1990s as something akin to an economic federation—via the single market and a partial monetary union—it remained dependent on outsourcing its security to an inherently unstable NATO.
* * *
It was in these decades after the Second World War that oil became the world’s most important energy source. In 1950, oil constituted around 20 per cent of total world energy consumption. By 1960, that proportion had risen to 27 per cent. By 1970, it had jumped to 40 per cent.19 In the United States, oil had replaced coal as the single biggest energy source by 1950, and between 1950 and 1970 total oil consumption doubled.20 In France, oil represented more than three-fifths of total energy consumption by 1970; in Italy that proportion was almost three-quarters.21 While oil mattered during the two world wars and the interwar years for military power, from the 1950s onwards it came to matter for domestic economies and everyday life, not least in relation to transportation. Although the United States had moved towards high levels of car ownership in the 1920s, only in the 1960s did European countries reach comparable levels.22
Well before this massive expansion in consumption, the question of from where the West European countries, all lacking a domestic supply, could import oil was a crucial geopolitical concern. As the Cold War began, the Truman administration encouraged West European governments towards using more oil since with Poland under Soviet control they could not depend on Polish coal exports. But increasing West European peacetime oil dependency came with risks. Truman and his advisers wished to control the sources of West European supply. They did not want Western Europe or Japan to accept Soviet oil, and, in 1949, the administration imposed an embargo on Soviet imports.23
But nor did Truman wish Western Europe and Japan to recreate any of their previous dependency on Western Hemisphere imports, preferring to preserve American and Venezuelan supply for American use in a world where the largest reserves lay in Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, Iran, and Iraq.24 Consequently, Western Europe was left to rely on oil from the Middle East, with the United States acting only as a supplier of last resort.25
This strategy relied on American support for infrastructure that would transport oil from the Middle East to Europe as well as to Japan. In Japan’s case, tankers moving down the Persian Gulf were the only option. But for Western Europe, the Truman administration also supported the construction of a new pipeline—Tapline, also known as the Trans-Arabian pipeline—to take oil from Saudi Arabia to Sidon on the Lebanese coast via Syria. Once built, Tapline complemented the Iraq Petroleum Company’s old pipeline network running from Iraq to the eastern Mediterranean coast.
Oil supplied to Western Europe from the Middle East also raised issues around the dollar’s primacy. Britain could buy oil in sterling from the British companies in Iraq and Iran, and British politicians were acutely aware that sterling oil was a significant cushion for the British balance of payments.26 Given the dollar shortage in Western Europe, sterling oil was also attractive to others. If the West Europeans were to buy oil from the American companies in the Middle East, they needed dollars. Consequently, providing dollars for oil was one part of the rationale for the Marshall Plan: perhaps around 20 per cent of Marshall aid went in one way or another on oil payments.27
But a fundamental fault line ran through this American conception of post-war Eurasia. Even though they thought of the Middle East as a site of the Cold War, American presidents from Truman to Johnson were unwilling to station American troops in the Middle East or commit the American Navy to heavy-duty service in the Persian Gulf. Fearing both an overstretch of American military commitments and domestic unpopularity, they, consequently, needed Britain to maintain its empire in the Middle East, even as India’s independence had stripped Britain of military resources that it had historically relied upon to police the Persian Gulf.28 During these early Cold War years, American planning for a war with Moscow required air attacks deployed from Britain’s military bases in Egypt.29 To this end, Truman financially supported Britain developing the Abu Sueir base at Suez. But Washington also worried that Britain’s ongoing imperial presence in the Middle East was destructive. Accordingly, Truman’s immediate successor, Dwight Eisenhower, wanted to accommodate Arab nationalism directed against Britain. After Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1953, Eisenhower used American financial power to push Britain to withdraw from the Suez Canal zone and close the Abu Sueir base.30 When Nasser then turned Egypt towards the Soviet Union, Eisenhower could only encourage Britain to form an anti-Soviet military alliance with Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Turkey. He refused to contemplate American membership of this Baghdad Pact.
Turkey too posed awkward issues in the 1950s for the American approach to Eurasia that retain their purchase today. After Stalin had given the Turkish government an ultimatum in 1946 to allow joint Soviet–Turkish control over the Dardanelles, Truman had ordered American ships into the Mediterranean and authorized plans for air operations. Whatever Truman’s rhetorical grandiosity about why aid to Greece and Turkey was necessary, in practice energy realism prevailed; as Truman said in private about these Mediterranean commitments, ‘look at a map’.31 For Truman, Greece and Turkey had to be defended as bulwarks against the Soviet Union turning to the Middle East for oil, even as, in fact, Stalin offered little to the Greek communists. Not uncoincidentally, on the same day Truman asked Congress to finance Greece and Turkey, the four big American oil companies signed a collective agreement to participate together in Aramco.32
Yet when the Cold War stretched to the Middle East, Turkey’s absence from NATO exposed the limits of a security alliance focused on Western Europe. In 1952, the Truman administration resolved this contradiction with Turkish and Greek accession to NATO. But this move produced sharp internal NATO divisions, with some European members preferring a clear demarcation between Western European and Middle Eastern security. Ever since—as will be discussed in the next chapter—there have been persistent questions about a number of European states’ willingness to defend Turkey as a NATO member.33
For all this incoherence, the American military absence from the Middle East did not mean an eschewal of American coercive force in the region. Indeed, it could not. Consequently, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), established by Truman with authority to engage in covert action against other states that could plausibly be denied, became active in the region. After the Syrian Parliament chose not to ratify the agreement to route Tapline through Syria, the CIA engineered a coup to ensure a government that would proceed with the pipeline.34 The CIA also proved the means for extending American assistance to Britain in Iran. When a new Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 and terminated the concession, Britain enforced a blockade in the Persian Gulf against Iranian oil exports. While the Truman administration tried to broker a compromise, Eisenhower was persuaded that the CIA should act with British intelligence to remove Mosaddegh from power.35 In the short term, this intervention required the Eisenhower administration to push American companies into a new consortium with an Iranian national company to rebuild the Iranian oil sector. In the long term, it acutely damaged American relations with Iran, and turned the Middle East into an even bigger strategic burden for the United States.36
Atlantic Splinter
In 1956, the inherent tensions of the United States acting as an oil guarantor for its allies via a supply coming from a part of the world where it lacked military power produced a profound geopolitical crisis whose monumental consequences still reverberate.37 Too often seen primarily as a story about post-war British power, the Suez crisis shattered the idea that the United States would always act as an oil supplier of last resort to its allies, reintroduced Soviet oil into Western Europe, and ended the illusion American presidents held that they could keep the United States militarily out of the Middle East.
The crisis began when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and shut it to Israeli shipping. In 1956, around 70 per cent of Western Europe’s oil passed from the Persian Gulf up through the Canal. Immediately, Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, told Eisenhower that he believed that if Nasser did not back down force should be used to stop him, and in the event of the Canal being closed ‘supplementary [oil] supplies for a time from your side of the world’ might be necessary.38 Eisenhower replied to Eden’s letter by saying that unless it was absolutely demonstrated that all peaceful means had been exhausted ‘there would be a reaction that could very seriously affect our people’s feeling towards our Western Allies’ with quite possibly ‘the most far-reaching consequences’.39 When, in October 1956, Britain, France, and Israel launched unilateral military action against Egypt, Eisenhower, just days away from a presidential election, reacted furiously. With the Canal shut, the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline sabotaged by the Syrian army, and Saudi Arabia embargoing exports to Britain and France, Eisenhower refused to release supplies from the American emergency programme.40 ‘They can’, he said, ‘boil in their own oil so to speak.’41 Used to purchasing oil in sterling, Britain was now confronted with dollar-denominated imports from the Western Hemisphere. When Khrushchev then threatened, albeit as a bluff, nuclear attacks on Britain and France, Eisenhower’s Treasury prevented Britain drawing dollars from its IMF quota.42 Immediately, the British government terminated its military action without consulting the French or Israeli governments.
The crisis necessarily exposed the incoherencies in the American approach to the Middle East, which simultaneously encouraged West European oil dependency on the region, relied on British military power, and accommodated the Arab nationalism that was pushing the British Empire in the Middle East towards its end. Afterwards, Eisenhower tried to reconstruct American influence via the more conservative Arab states. Under the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Saudi King, in alliance with Iraq, was supposed to become the regional leader and provide an alternative Arab pivot to the burgeoning Egypt–Syria axis.43 But radical Arab nationalism could not be contained within state borders. In February 1958, Egypt and Syria formed a political union—the United Arab Union. Over the following months, the Saudi King was forced to appoint the more radical crown prince as a prime minister, and a group of military officers toppled the Iraqi monarchy and allied the country with the new Egyptian–Syrian state. With the British military having now lost its bases in Iraq, it could no longer reach the Gulf by air from Turkey and had to rely on an operational base at Aden at the eastern entrance to the Red Sea.44 As the British position deteriorated, Eisenhower became the first American president to use military force in the Middle East by ordering troops into Lebanon to prop up the pro-American government in Beirut.45 But this did not represent a change in strategy, only a reaction to the chaos of events. For the next decade, American policy became ever more focused on keeping Britain committed to its small Gulf protectorates and position at Aden.
Suez also inflicted severe long-term damage on NATO’s cohesion. West European dismay at American action was widespread. The West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, described the British and French military action ‘as an act of European raison d’état’.46 Eisenhower’s actions during the Suez crisis accelerated the inter-governmental conference about creating what became the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM). In the belief he could secure a decisive French commitment to proceed with the EEC and EURATOM, Adenauer went to Paris to offer his support to the French premier, Guy Mollet. After the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, called Mollet to say that he had succumbed to Eisenhower’s pressure, Adenauer told Mollet, ‘we have no time to waste. Europe will be your revenge.’ 47
But Suez also exposed West European divisions around security that made confederation or federation difficult. The last Fourth Republic French governments concluded that France needed nuclear weapons to lessen French security and technological dependency on the United States.48 By 1956, France had already started a nuclear programme and saw in EURATOM a means to complete it. Adenauer, by contrast, wanted to strengthen European defence capacity without jeopardizing NATO, which meant enticing Britain into any new European confederation or federation. But the British government, under Harold Macmillan, wanted to preserve NATO and still did not wish to join a European customs union.
These post-Suez conflicts could not be resolved. Under Charles de Gaulle’s leadership, French policy became ever more confrontational. De Gaulle wanted geopolitical, as well as economic, distance from both the United States and Britain, culminating in him withdrawing France from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966 and twice vetoing British applications to join the EEC. He also wanted to move the EEC states towards a security confederation. In this he failed for reasons that have endured. For de Gaulle, there could be no European security so long as the Cold War left Europe at the mercy of an American–Soviet nuclear confrontation. But for Adenauer, and the other EEC member leaders, there could be no security without NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. Consequently, the EEC in the 1960s remained trapped between its existence as a customs union with a common agricultural support system which de Gaulle tolerated, and its security dependency on NATO, which de Gaulle did not accept.
The French contribution to this impasse was matched in reverse by the British. The Macmillan government responded to Suez by trying to repair relations with Washington. It too drew a lesson about the necessity of nuclear weapons but sought the answer in bilateral cooperation with Washington to secure them. As far as the EEC was concerned, Macmillan believed the British interest lay in a free trade agreement between the EEC and the British-led European Free Trade Area. Repeatedly threatening between 1958 and 1961 to withdraw British troops from Western Europe, he erroneously assumed that the EEC could be coerced via its security weakness into agreeing one.49 During John F. Kennedy’s presidency, these two post-Suez problems for Britain came together. Fearing de Gaulle’s ambitions, Kennedy enticed Macmillan to apply for accession to the EEC.50 But in granting submarine-launched Polaris missiles to Macmillan in the 1962 Nassau agreement, Kennedy gave de Gaulle a ready justification for damning Britain’s EEC application as a ‘trojan horse’ for American interests in Europe.
